by Bob Totterer

Created on: November 12, 2008

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Why, the chicken, of course. We know that because Genesis tells us that God created all living things alive, telling them to reproduce after their own kind. For that reason, there must have been horses before there was a foal; deer before there was a fawn; chickens before there was a hatchling chick.

Why is that relevant to this discussion? God created His universe mature and fully functional, not in a state of incubation or dormancy. God does not deal in half-measures; neither must He do things in stages. The notion that matter must have existed prior to God having created the universe is fatally flawed, both logically and theologically.

The theological argument is rather easy to make. John's gospel emphatically states that He made everything that was made. Everything. That would include the tiny hydrogen atom. To state otherwise is to claim that God merely assembled an already existing universe. Assembly falls well short of creation, leaving us to ponder who might have created the raw materials in the first place. Such a notion implies the existence of another god, one perhaps greater in power than the God of the bible. That is blasphemy and it should help settle the issue for believers.

Let us now consider the logical argument. Everything that exists in this universe must occupy physical space and is subject to the passage of time. While that is true of both matter and energy, God is eternal. He does not require space and time in which to exist. The eternal and the temporal are, by definition, mutually exclusive. This space and time that we call the universe, along with all of its physical laws, did not exist until God created it. That means that there was no place in which matter and energy could exist, in any form, prior to God having created such a place.

Genesis 1:1 tells us that God created the heaven and the earth "in the beginning". This verse no doubt refers to the beginning of time. It could not refer to the beginning of creation, since creation is being described. So the heavens, the stars, planets, galaxies and the vast expanse of space were created in the beginning of time. Where, and more to the point, when, would the virgin matter of the cosmos have been created? We have already established that it could not have existed outside of space and time. Yet, we see the stars and planets created by God "in the beginning". We may only conclude that God created this universe from nothing and in one continuous act.

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>